I got the bonus disc for Inland Empire and watched parts of it. Did you know that there's 1 1/2 hours of deleted scenes, bringing the total time of the movie to 4 1/2 hours? After watching that, and a few other bits, I packed up the movie and the bonus disc and returned them both to Netflix. I give up. I'm perfectly fine with the fact that the movie won.

There was a scene with Nastassja Kinski. Also something about buying a watch that would change your luck that lasted like a couple of hours or something. I don't know. I totally lost interest. Any movie that requires me to invest MORE than 7 1/2 hours of my time is not worth my time. But since you were more entranced by it, just be sure to rent the bonus disc with the movie. There's a bunch of David Lynch talking about stuff, as well as all the deleted scenes. (It was probably good, but I'm a bit drunk and don't recall it fondly right now.)

I don't like the extent to which his review is a trendpiece on mumblecore. Good to know he thinks it's over.

But yeah I'm pretty excited to see Hannah Takes the Stairs. I will say, though, that after having seen Bujalski's films and "The Puffy Chair," I was sort of surprised at, well, the nudity in Kissing on the Mouth. More power to Swanberg and Kris Williams and whoever they have working with them, I guess. And it works in context. But I must admit it was jarring at first.

I think that's part of what I liked so much about it. Is that awful? I was always frustrated to an extent by the clues-that-lead-nowhere aspect of Lynch's later work, so I'm glad he's given up pretending that his films' mysteries have an answer.

It seems to me the Lynch's movies are more about exploring ideas and taking abstractions to their (il)logical conclusion than any kind of literal sense.

Mulholland Dr.'s "solvable mystery" was cool in that it garnered way more casual discussion of that movie than it otherwise may have, but like you, I'm glad he just took that nutball muse of his and followed way past the end of the sidewalk.

it's starz free weekend and i'm glued to the tv with a thermos of liquified cotton candy, a collapsable stomach, and a gradually disipitating air of disbelief. why, you might, possibly, ask, would a guy be tunin into the starz free weekend and feel so polar opposite of what a starz weekend is supposed to make you feel?

oh, a lil movie called Little Man with the midget who pretends to be a baby.

Despite a lifelong devotion to trash cinema, I'd never gotten into Jess Franco; of his 190 films, I think I'd seen three before this week. But with a Franco double feature at the Egyptian coming up, I decided to explore his work a bit.

I started with a bootleg of the 1974 Lorna, the Exorcist, which I don't think was ever released in the U.S. It stars his wife Lina Romay, and the version I saw retains the often-deleted hardcore lesbian sex scenes that she did. I've never understood why straight guys get so excited about watching lesbians, and I don't share Franco's obsession with s/m either, but the movie was nonetheless entrancing in its dreamlike, nearly avant-garde lack of concern for narrative momentum. To my surprise, I really liked it.

Next were Vampyros Lesbos and Female Vampire. All three of these films are nearly exact replicas, minus the hardcore sex in these cases (though they come close), but I found myself rapidly succumbing to the Franco aesthetic of jazzy scores, random cutaways to insects or buildings, out-of-focus shots of copulating couples, and plenty of sadomasochism.

Yesterday the double feature rolls around. Venus in Furs is first, and it begins with an official MPAA X rating screen, which is more rare than people might think (the MPAA never copyrighted the X, so most cinematic X's are unofficial). I love those old blue ratings screens from the late 60s and 1970s (this was 1970) for some reason, so I was already happy. The film is more of the same, but a bit more pseudo-artsy--it has that Last Year at Marienbad non-linear obscurantism of Radley Metzger's films from this period, plus Klaus Kinski as a Turkish prince and a really killer score. I'm sold.

Next is The Awful Dr. Orlof, a 1962 effort that plays like mid-level Hammer and clearly preceded the unfurling of Franco's freak flag. It's pretty mediocre, and I actually dozed off in the theater a few times.

Still, I'm pretty delighted with my belated discovery of Jess Franco, and I've got more of his stuff on the way.

Oh yeah, and in between all that, I saw F for Fake, Orson Welles' final completed theatrically-released film. It's a lot of fun, a documentaryesque cinematic essay on forgery, wrapped up in self-referential trickery and concluding on a surprisingly erotic note with a story about Picasso. It deals a lot with Clifford Irving, he of the fake Howard Hughes bio, so it would make a great double feature with Hoax.

Normally I'm pretty anal about devoting singular attention to films I watch, but Jess Franco's Sadomania isn't doing much for me right now. There's a newlywed couple dragged into a women's prison run by transsexual (MTF) porn star Ajita Wilson, who keeps her inmates topless and is now playing a game with the governor in which they let a naked woman run into a swamp and then shoot her. I dunno, this has none of the seductive dreamscape allure of his earlier films (this was 1981).

So at poker the other night, I ask the group if anyone's seen Superbad, and two of them said they'd walked out of it! They thought it was so incredibly offensive that their sensitive little minds couldn't take it. I was shocked. Shocked! I mean, what's the difference between this movie and American Pie? Except that it's funny?

Normally I'm pretty anal about devoting singular attention to films I watch, but Jess Franco's Sadomania isn't doing much for me right now. There's a newlywed couple dragged into a women's prison run by transsexual (MTF) porn star Ajita Wilson, who keeps her inmates topless and is now playing a game with the governor in which they let a naked woman run into a swamp and then shoot her. I dunno, this has none of the seductive dreamscape allure of his earlier films (this was 1981).

Lest that post dissuade anyone from watching Sadomania, let the record duly note that the film does launch into the pervosphere once it gets rolling, with a great naked spearfight and a jawdroppingly tasteless scene in which the impotent governor can only get it up to impregnate his wife by watching a female inmate get raped by a dog. Still not my cup of sleaze, but not entirely run-of-the-mill, either.

There is a nice Jess Franco interview on the DVD in which he discusses the difficulties of finding attractive young women willing to be naked extras while shooting low-budget in rural Spain and the politics of shooting smutty films in post-Franco (the other Franco) Spain. He also exhibits a refreshingly trans-positive attitude while discussing Ajita Wilson.